Sidebottom actually started on a hat trick, having taken two wickets in two balls at the end of New Zealand’s first innings. He failed, but no matter, another hat trick opportunity soon arose. They’re nothing special. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in taking three wickets with consecutive deliveries.

Alastair Cook caught the first two and they were blinders. Prior to this Test, Alastair Cook was considered at best a mediocre fielder, but he’s taken about five jaw-dropping catches over the last four days; five real eye-catchers. We’ve never seen such a transformation.

The flipside of this is that England have effectively set themselves a stiff target where they’d probably just expected to have to bat out a short amount of time previously. New Zealand will be quite happy with this, we suspect.